NOW & THEN
MAY 16
1568: Mary Queen of Scots sailed from Port Mary across Solway Firth to begin her exile in England.
1770: Marie Antoinette was married to France’s King Louis XVI.
1908: Britain’s first diesel submarine, D1, was launched at Barrow.
1920: Joan of Arc was canonised.
1938: The Women’s Voluntary Services Association was formed by the Marchioness of Reading, as the WVS. The Royal tag was added in 1966.
1943: The Dambusters, using “skip” bombs invented by Dr Barnes Wallis, made their famous raid on the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson.
1956: Jim Laker of Surrey took all ten Australian wickets for 88 runs at the Oval.
1969: The Russian spacecraft Venus 5 touched down on Venus to send back information about the planet's atmosphere.
1975: Local Government (Scotland) Act (1974) came into effect, replacing 430 local authorities with nine regional, 53 district and three islands councils.
1975: Mrs Junko Tabei, of Japan, climbed Mount Everest, the first woman to do so.
1983: London police began fitting wheel clamps to illegally parked vehicles.
1989: The Guardian Angels began work as vigilantes on London Underground trains.
1989: Hundreds of thousands from all walks of life arrived in Peking, China, to support college students fasting for freedom in Tiananmen Square.
1990: Responding to Soviet pressure, Lithuanian government suspended enforcement of independence laws in that republic.
1990: British Steel announced the decision to close the hot strip mill at Ravenscraig with the loss of 770 jobs.
1990: Pavarotti sang to an audience of 12,000 at a sell-out concert at the SECC, Glasgow.
1991: President François Mitterrand appointed France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson.
1992: The United States won the yachting world’s premier competition, the America’s Cup.
1993: In referendum, Bosnian Serbs overwhelmingly rejected the Vance-owen peace plan for the former Yugoslavia.
2003: In Casablanca, Morocco, 33 civilians were killed and more than 100 people are injured in terrorist attacks.
2004: The Day of Mourning at Bykivnia forest, just outside of Kiev, Ukraine. Here during the 1930s and early 1940s communist bolsheviks executed over 100,000 Ukrainian civilians.
2005: Kuwait permitted women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.
2008: South African 400 metre runner Oscar Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated as a child, was told by the IAAF he could compete against ablebodied athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games using carbon-fibre blades.
2014: Thurso, the most northerly town on the Scottish mainland, was earmarked by conservationists as a haven for the great yellow bumblebee.